"Dervish in Progress", A performance by Ziya Azazi during CanAsian dance Festival in Toronto (2011)

When you are unique you can be amazing, that’s what Ziya Azizi’s performance is: amazing, spectacular, beautiful, and dramatic. 

Yesterday (1) I saw Ziya Azazi performing Dervish in Progress, one of his latest works (2004). The last 11 years he has been whirling not as a mystic dancer but as an artistic one. What does that mean? That Ziya is not a dervish or a sufi practitioner, he is a dancer, a choreographer, an artist who has found his technical way in dance through whirling. That’s why he is unique.

Watching a dervish dancing can be a dizzy experience, yes, but also a mystical one, you can be transported to another state of mind just for watching it and listening to the music; and you can also say that it is beautiful (very beautiful for many), but it stops there: there is no "a work of art", there is no ideas or interpretation to transmit to anybody beyond the practitioner's himself. “Dervish in progress” offers us, spectators, a rare opportunity to be transported to a different state (through watching whirling continuously, during 20 minutes,) mixed with a modern aesthetic experience. At Ziya Azazi’s performance we were, in one moment and in our seat, moving with him, feeling that obligatory dizziness and being amazed by his movements, but also he was telling us something, a kind of story, revealing to us his experience while dancing and exposing the inner conflict a dervish in progress has.

“Dervish in progress” talks about the struggle for cleansing the performer’s body and mind; it show us how, during the movement, the dancer is transported to another state but also how his experience as a dancer become more powerful than the religious motives that set him originally in motion. Whirling gives him a freedom that ideas and mental postures cannot. We are then witnesses to his fight and to his cleansing, watching how, without stoping whirling (which is remarkable), he takes off his hat, his shirt and two skirts to end up wearing only one black skirt; we also see how, in the same way he took off his clothes, he gets rid of his religious beliefs, throwing away the gestures of the three main religious traditions: the Christian sign of the cross with his hand, the muslim salutation with the palm on the heart, onto the forehead and to the sky, and the Buddhist posture with palms together and an inclined head. That fight is not totally successful, the skirt itself finishes by absorbing him, and he practically disappears in front of our eyes: you can say he won the fight and he fused with the universe, but you can also interpret that his fight it is a tragedy, an unbearable weight that finishes by absorbing (or crushing) him.

Ziya Azazi expose his struggle, yes, his doubts and he’s not afraid to express how he is getting rid of his religious ideas (whether christian, muslim or buddhist), he is an honest artist and he has built an honest work.

I believe Ziya Azazi does with dervish whirling what Zeami did with Noh Theatre centuries ago, moving a religious art to an artistic form, “cleaning” it of any religiosity by looking at its sources, the experience of movement itself, but also by adding to it an artistic interpretation and the dramatic possibilities to transmit feelings, ideas and stories. 

Program information at CanAsian's performance (Harbourfront Centre, Feb 23rd, 2011)

This is the whole performance recorded in 2005:

DERVISH IN PROGRESS, 2005, by Ziya Azazi from ZIYA AZAZI on Vimeo.
This solo is a contemporary interpretation of traditional Sufi dances, reflecting Ziya Azazi’s personal, artistic, conceptual and motional analysis. Physical awareness and a high state of meditation are aimed to be represented simultaneously. It searches for the Dervish a high level of speed, tension and emotion while it suggests to create a space for the viewer to experience these moods.

This performance represents the moment of Dervish when s/he starts to enjoy his/her achievement through the joyful and ecstatic repetition of whirling: the looping of spinning which lead to trance. The three skirt costumes intensify this joy with their illuminated and diverse colours and forms.

This dynamic, metamorphic solo transforms the classical Sufi dance into a spectacular form as it suggest possibilities for joy to become ritual, without needing boundaries of existing belief systems.

Dance/Choreography: ZIYA AZAZI

Costume: ISCHIKO

Light Desing: GERMANO MILITE

Music mix based on : MERCAN DEDE

(1) That was on February 23rd, 2011 at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto.

"On the side of the road" a Theatre Performance in Toronto

Program of "On the side of the road" a Theatre Performance in Toronto
Originally uploaded by Gustavo Thomas

Curious production by Theatre Junction (Calgary), "On the side of the road" at Fleck Dance Theatre in Toronto.

A Happening-like style production but with a common American way of saying things: storytelling (monologues of the characters addressed to the public telling their views about the story and their views about anything) with some dramatized scenes.

A very open style of directing theatre where anything can happen: live music, singing, dancing, sculpture and acting in French or English are all mixed, almost with success.

What it seems very interesting, from my point of view, is the Canadian roots inside the play: it is a Canadian story with Canadian characters (well, one of them is French) in a very Canadian atmosphere, where deers and lakes and trees are symbols, are ways of understanding life and are more than subjects of interest.

It happened that I saw it, happened I liked it.

So, now I can keep my self repeating the last song:

"I am a deer, deer, I am a deer!..."

Here a video a found in Youtube about "On the side of the road"

Theatre Junction page: http://www.theatrejunction.com/

Box, a Dance Performance by InDance at Fleck Dance Theatre in Toronto

They are dancers with Asian and Western background, leading by and Indian-Canadian choreographer; they dance with old and new styles, with old and new stories, using a traditional Indian technique of dance in contemporary, modern, funny, queer, gay, and kitsch subjects, and they most of the time are successful in it.

Last Saturday night enjoyed (because it was a pleasure) Box, a dance performance by InDance, directed by Hari Krishnan, at Fleck Dance Theatre. Seven surprising choreographies full of energy, good humour and beauty. You will see in the videos I've posted (from InDance's Yotube page) that mix and energy I'm talking about.

InDance is doing what many (many) dance companies around the world: taking their ancient techniques of movement and folk stories and transporting them to our times talking about our times. Many are successful and many simply are not. But the most interesting thing in InDance is that they are trying to talk about queer contemporary culture in a fresh and funny way with a very powerful theatrical weapon as ancient Indian dance technique is (and a little part of classical dance and ballet from Western culture), and you don't see anything like this in other part of the world... And they are doing it well.

In the end of Box you have not changed your way of seeing the world (even the world of the dance), not, but you leave the theatre with a big smile after have had a very new, powerful and different experience as a dance spectator, a surprising combination between the seriousness of an ancient performative culture and a new approach to our current bizarre way of living.

Different ways of saying things are the first big step of the big changes and I appreciate that InDance has shared it with us. We'll see how it goes through the time.

As usual, no videos or photographs allowed inside Harbourfront, so here a slideshow of photographs of the program and of some decoration at the theatre's hall, then three promotional videos from InDance's Youtube page.

Slideshow: InDance at Fleck Dance Theatre. March, 2010.

Videos: Promotional clips of Box, by InDance.

"Do Animals Cry", a Dance Theatre Performance at Fleck Dance Theatre in Toronto

Do Animals Cry

by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods

with Joris camelin, Alexander Jenkins, Adam Linder, Anja Müller, Kotomi Nishiwaki, Frank Willens.

I wrote in twitter:

"unbearable long and tedious dance about a single crazy-unhappy family exposed in chaotic movements and common actions. Hate it or love it."

Two hours watching dance performed in a monotonous contemporary movement style, kind of mini physical actions interconnected by a internal story (I guess) without any link to harmony or musical rhythm, accompanied by some musical extracts that only remarked the monotony of the style and with a very poor lighting work.

At the beginning I was there fresh, watching, laughing, living their movements even with reflexes in my own body provoked by those movements (True!), but after several scenes and time passed my mind started to be tired, my easy-biginnig relation with the performance gone away and what happened after it was almost unbearable, the worst thing a spectator can experiment watching any performance, tediousness.

I really was there! I was watching fascinated those strange but concrete movements of our common life, movements recalling my family as they asked spectators to do before the performance; watching and feeling that kind of stress, of violence only because those movement were chosen among thousand and then joined edited with unbearable cruelty... But too much it is too much, not talking about that cruelty, not about that violence, not about recalling my life as a family child, not, it was too much of the style, of the music, of the continuous and long process of living a family in this tiring way during two hours.

In one moment I was seeing an approach to Pina Bausch, telling those things like she used to do it, but everything broke up when scene by scene my patience as spectator became tiredness.

The work was amazing, as a dance itself; loved the dancers's work as a group and their individuality on stage, creating characters, speaking, feeling, but simply a could not love the whole work when a general stage direction provoked that more of one half of the spectators were yawing every two minutes and looking their watches.

I didn't learn much watching a family who looked crazy and unhappy (as usually British depict any of their families in art), however I enjoyed several moments, images and movements: I loved how one of the children ran in circles during 5 minutes; another son seated on a chair over one small dog-family house; a crazy party were some spoke singing sentences of sociability while others dancing were dying of sociability (actually getting drunk and being rebellious); and I won't forget that girl becoming adult showing her impudence to her parents.

As I finished my twitter-140-word-sentence you can love this amazing dance theatre production, but I can not, I hated it.

Slideshow: poster and program

Video (trailer) from Youtube

Video, Rehearsals in France (Tolouse) and an Interview